Develop into your own beautiful human, first. A lot of dudes are mid at best; myself included
that advice is completely valid for men too, hell, the amount of male friends that i have that are felling alone and think that getting a girlfriend gonna fix that, fuck that, and they fuck woman friendship because they “fall in love” with any woman that give them attention, and they still refuse to listen to me when i say to them to improve themselves that love gonna come naturally, it’s tiring, and i say that as a man who also sometimes feel alone and also mistaken attention with love, i just learned from advice that i read and i’m feeling a lot better, why, why they are such morons
It’s because societal norms don’t teach boys and men the proper way to deal with emotions. It’s more implied we will be fine or know how to deal with them, and generally not a lot of room for guys to explore them.
There’s also a push for guys to be competitive, achieve, etc. which conditions us to seek more of the positive emotions that come with ‘victory’. That thinking quickly can become an echo chamber inside your head, with all kinds of negative things associated with it; the least of which is ‘I am worthless unless I achieve’.
The world would be a much better place if guys were in tune with their inner feelings, knew how to deal with them, and weren’t terrified of being vulnerable around others. This also applies to women, but from my vantage point, to a lesser degree
Spot on. For years I had my self worth valued based on the women I was with/dating.
After a divorce and string of bad relationships/breakups, I realized the issue was, largely, because of me. I wasn’t focused and invested in myself enough to be comfortable without a partner in my life. Which made me desperate, and that comes across and attracted the wrong sort of women to me, as well as kept my self worth artificially low so I allowed myself to be abused by others in the relationships.
Spend time on yourself and being comfortable being alone. Be happy alone first. Then look for opportunities to meet people who can enhance your happiness, but not be the source of your happiness, if that makes any sense. That’s how good relationships work I finally learned.
Same for men. I definitely would’ve ended up in a better place if I hadn’t wasted my time chasing women & their attention & approval when I was in my 20s.
Well, women don’t say random shit at you on the streets, for example. I’m a man so I don’t have the fortune, but I’m sure there’s a lot more they have to deal with.
I think poster is just making it clear that in the context of this post (and life) women are subjected to strange men’s “advice” and are in fact pressured by street strangers to conform to male desire, a phenomenon men are not subjected to. You’re comment didnt explicitly diminish that fact, but i can see how someone reading it might feel the need to clarify the difference
I’m a dude, and I agree.
Same advice applies to dudes too TBH. We’d all be a lot better off if we figured our shit out before inflicting ourselves on each other and fucking us up even more.
Could really just remove the genders from what this person said and make it applicable to everyone. Young men should be doing the same thing.
Toxic femininity and masculinity both push the narrative of how young men need to constantly pursue women, and everything they do should be in pursuit of chasing pussy. How men should always be available to women when the time comes.
Grow for yourself.
Yes.
Men are miles behind on the self development front in a lot of cases though. Generational suppression of feelings and an inability to cope with them correctly has done us a massive disservice. Like a deer with chronic wasting disease, we stagger on, continuing to do the same thing, despite how tragically fucked up we are.
Why is this a gendered thing? If you replaced “Younger girls” with “any person” and “Men” with “Other people” then this not only remains true, but actually makes just as much sense and applies to more situations.
As a bisexual person, it is very weird to me on a conceptual level how much weight people put behind genders. Like, whether I find a person attractive or not does not correlate to whether they present masculine or feminine, or which sex they had assigned at birth. Like logically I understand why it is the way it is, I’ve just never felt it for myself and assumed everyone just sorta pretends it matters, until I figured out I’m bi.
Hmm, maybe that’s why I have a similar mindset to you. I’m not sure it’s related to my sexuality though. Possibly, but I’ve just been screwed over by people in all kinds of relationships to me, whether it be family, people in positions of authority over me, co-workers, friends and also people I’ve been in a romantic relationships with.
It seems strange to put so much weight on gender and also so much weight on romance / intimacy when doing things solely to please others whilst neglecting your own needs and desires is bad regardless of your relationship with that person.
I feel the specificity is to drive home the point to the target of this message. You can generalize advice to be more accurate and apply to more people, but it’ll be as wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle.
People are really great at excluding themselves from general advice like “don’t worry about judgement”, they need to feel like the message is tailored to their own experiences.
You can definitely recycle the message with a male or gender neutral tone, but that’ll lead to different conversations. Sometimes people don’t want to speak out to a generic broad audience, they want a more specific conversation.
Valid point. Narrowing the audience of the message can make sense, but weakening the actual lesson by ignoring all the other people you shouldn’t please with no regard for your own feelings I don’t think is a great idea. After all, we all seek validation from our peers far too often and this can be devastating to our mental health and wellbeing.
But you often should worry about being a good friend and a good student and a good daughter and a good person. And much of how we judge if we’re hitting those marks is how other people feel about us. And sometimes being a good friend/student/daughter/person means some degree of self-sacrafice. So “don’t worry about what anyone thinks”/“don’t compromise on your feelings” isn’t the right message either. That message gets nuanced and complex fairly quickly, whereas it’s reasonable not to worry about romantic relationships, period, when you’re young.
Why is this what you’re worried about? This person is talking to a specific group, and to a soecific group that is often told that their only value is in being attractive men. While us dudes would also benefit from this advice we often find our hobbies and our romantic lives more separated than women.
Wording it like that is coming off as such a “why aren’t we talking about me though?!”
I don’t think that assumption holds. Many activities like hyper masculine sports or body building are culturally tied to impressing women. Dudes getting in shape or “winning” to impress some girl is a common troupe. By the same token, many “feminine hobbies” like makeup and fashion are often about feeling confident about oneself and less about impressing dudes.
Both masculine and feminine hobbies get grouped in with impressing the opposite gender, but both are usually not about that for many of the people involved. A guy dressing fem isn’t necessarily trying to seduce men and a girl who makes gains and plays football isn’t necessarily a lesbian.
Hobbies and romantic lives aren’t more or less tied depending on gender, it’s just that women get presumed to only exist for men. The other reasons men do manly things are more easily recognized. Femininity gets assumed to exist just for men, but masculinity doesn’t get assumed to exist just for women.